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The Southbury woman looking to retrieve her family's artwork plundered by the Nazis, found in an apartment of a German recluse in 2012, does not believe her family's chances have brightened after his death Tuesday.

Nor does Martha Hinrichsen believe that the promise by a Swiss museum designated to inherit the art will return it to its rightful heirs make it likely that she will see the work returned in her lifetime.

That decision, she said Friday, will still reside with the authorities selected to determine whether the artwork was illegally obtained by the Nazis, as her family has spent the last 70 years asserting.

"I don't think (our chances) have improved," said Hinrichsen. "The only way they're going to improve is if whoever one is going to be in charge of determining who has accurately documented (whether the artwork was plundered) says, 'OK, the Henri Hinrichsen heirs have totally documented their painting has been stolen, it should go back to them. Anything up to that point is nothing."

The death Tuesday of Cornelius Gurlitt, in whose apartment German officials found a trove of art suspected to have been looted by Nazis, changed the possibility that heirs like Hinrichsen might recover artwork plundered from their ancestors during World War II.

A German court reported this week that Gurlitt, who was 81, left a notarized will. The will left his artwork to the Kunstmuseum Bern, a Swiss museum. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the Swiss museum, which has yet to inherit the collection, said it wants any works found to have been looted by the Nazis returned to their original owners.

"I don't want artworks shown here which are doubtful and which could have been looted or stolen," the museum's director, Matthias Frehner, told the newspaper. The museum, which said it had no relationship with Gurlitt, is a signatory to a 1998 international agreement by which art institutions must return looted art or compensate its original owners.

"I think the museum is doing the right thing," Martha Hinrichsen said. "And I'm glad that their making that statement right away. So that's the positive thing."

Experts have said Gurlitt's stockpile of 1,400 art works, including those by Matisse, Picasso, Chagall, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann and others, is the biggest stockpile of looted art yet recovered, with an estimated worth of $1.4 billion.

Last month, Gurlitt agreed to a deal with the German government in which the artwork would be held by the government while it checked for possible Nazi connections. The task force has a year to research the paintings to determine which paintings were looted by the Nazis and which were not.

"I'm sure the task force is not in any rush," Martha Hinrichsen. "They will probably take the full year. At this point; there is nothing new or different for our family regarding the (contested artwork). Whether it gets returned to me in my lifetime remains to be seen. It's taken 70 years in some cases to return this art."

For the last 20 years, Hinrichsen, 65, had been searching for art that Nazis had pillaged from her grandfather, Henri Hinrichsen, nearly 75 years ago. Last fall, German officials announced that they had seized the art from Gurlitt's squalid Munich apartment in 2012 as part of a tax investigation.

Among the first group of artworks German authorities acknowledged were in the collection was a drawing by 19th-century German romanticist Carl Spitzweg. That drawing was formerly owned by Hinrichsen's grandfather, a prominent Leipzig music publisher and philanthropist. In the early 1940s, Hildebrand Gurlitt, one of four official dealers the Nazis allowed to buy and sell the modern, or "degenerate" art, confiscated or forced her grandfather to sell nearly 40 of his art works.

Henri Hinrichsen was arrested by the Gestapo on Sept. 15, 1942. He was gassed two days later at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi's largest killing camp.

Martha Hinrichsen says her grandfather's current heirs number 45 individuals scattered across Europe and the United States. She has estimated that the family has spent nearly $1 million on its restitution efforts.

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